An uncompromising yet accessible rejoinder to conventional wisdom about race and violence in the U.S.
A sharp alternative history of Black responses to white supremacy.
Jackson, a professor of Africana studies and author of Force and Freedom, fuses solid research with an urgent authorial voice, bringing a fresh perspective to the haunted history of American race relations. “This entire book consists of examples of Black people refusing lies, violence, theft, mockery, or second-class citizenship,” she writes. “It shows how our refusal denies whiteness and white supremacy their power and unearned authority.” In five thematically interlaced chapters, Jackson encourages readers “to think outside the binary of violence and nonviolence.” She argues that self-defense must be understood along the spectrum of resistance, including force, communal protection, and refuge in rituals of flight and joy. She examines the simmering of liberationist thought, exemplified by the Haitian revolution’s aftermath and the abolitionist era. “The late 1850s were precarious times,” she writes. “Black and white leaders sensed a breaking point regarding the institution of slavery in America.” The author also explores “the powerful relationship between Black women and force in the face of anti-Black violence,” unearthing startling stories of self-defense against the backdrop of horrific flashpoints—e.g., during the “Red Summer” of 1919 and the 1957 Little Rock integration crisis. By the late 1950s, writes the author, “the overall mood of Black Americans across the South was that white violence had to be met with force.” Jackson astutely examines the temptations of migration or flight, “a constant refrain or remedy in African American history” because “leaving is a form of refusal...something Black people have done in response to white supremacy for centuries.” This taut and fiery discussion focuses on historical research (with occasional repetition) and transformative figures (often little known) along with hard-won insight from Jackson’s personal experiences.
An uncompromising yet accessible rejoinder to conventional wisdom about race and violence in the U.S.Pub Date: June 4, 2024
ISBN: 9781541602908
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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